cognitive bias

Good logic and good data are indeed the essence of a good argument. Of course people could choose to deny it in the end, citing the axiom on which a good logic is based on can not be proved. Nonetheless, the grand point to argue with others (other intelligent people) is not to convince other people that what you are saying is correct so that you could claim victory in the battle to fulfill our intellectual’s mega ego. In my opinion, the grand point for the debate is to foster the clashes that could create sparkling for one’s own enlightenment. To explain further, there are four possible scenarios in an intellectual debate:

1. Let’s say both me and the opponent have good logic but my data is dwarfed by a better one in the debate. This is the most rewarding outcome I hope for. I would then love to absorb the new data and improve my knowledge and revise my logic so that it could better reflect the more thorough data it covers. Great learning experience.

2.Let’s say both me and the opponent have fairly the same level of knowledge about a debating issue, but his/her logic assumes way less axioms and hypotheses than mine. I feel like swallowing the bitterness but have to admit he/she has better logic structure than I do in such matter. I would be willing to be convinced as well and consequently upgrade my logic to incorporate his/her more sophisticated ideas. I consider it great learning experience as well.

3.Let’s say both appear to have well structured logic to one’s own data but I have better data than the opponent. Therefore most likely his logic can not stand still in front of mine. As a result, his argument eventually would be dwarfed by mine. I consider it a humanitarian mission to inspire those who are open-minded and stoic like myself to become more well-informed.

4.Let’s say both appear to have similar level of understanding in debating subjects but I have an apparently more straightforward and concise interpretation than the opponent. I then would love to help those potential individual spirits to improve their own perceptions about certain issues.

My friend omitted the first two scenarios and strictly emphasized on the latter two in his argument. But even himself did admit that he might not have the best data, so there’s always opportunities to learn from other hermits disguised in the populace, even for him. As a parenthetically unctuous blathering dabbler like myself, my own quintessence is far from perfection that could stay invincible over waves of intellectual clashes. The first two scenarios are the primary reasons why I want to exchange my ideas to others in the first place.

As for the last two scenarios, emotionally I am always willing to influence those potential He Shi Bi in this mediocre hubbub. Even though 8 out 10 times people retreat to the last resort to brawl for denial as my friend stated, there will always be some, if not many, insightful smart fellows who appreciate and benefit from those intellectual confrontation with me. For those who are persistently either cognitively biased (failed to recognize better logic) or ignorant (failed to possess better data), I don’t hold any illusion to proselytize them out of their slogan-shouting-fanatic religions. I have no problem being the target of their emotional outcry and denial for my blasphemy and apostasy to their gods, Allah, Jesus, Che Guevara, democracy, universal equity, white power, Gaia or whatsoever. I’d be rather interested in learning why those smart fellows devote their intelligence in something that could easily be debunked rationally in minutes. I consider this also fairly good learning outcome. Cognitive bias is always an interesting topic to explore for me, after all.

Reading is a good way to learn, so does the exchange of ideas to other living souls. I call it as a way to reach the Novel Point, where you could reach a new level of your own logic, data, and understanding of other people’s cognitive perspective from merely expressing your ideas with others. Subsequently you could upgrade your level, and others may as well. It’s the novel point where sparkling of the clash ignites a new area where has not been illuminated in your mind before. I consider that a very rewarding experience. Whether people dig signalling or not doesn’t matter to me, as long as I long for the soundness of the argument, to inspire and be inspired by people, even if I could only get into a good debate 1 out of 100 times.

P.S. Regarding the unfortunate encountering of dumbasses in a debate, I wouldn’t waste my time reasoning with unreasonable rocks as soon as I spot their stupidity and stubbornness. It is futile to lower your level into their quarrel.

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Yesterday I had an interesting debate with a friend of mine about the significance of debating. He was the one who inspired me to set up this blog in the first place. However, he is also the one who is strongly against the very idea of debating with others, or expressing one’s thoughts to others in general. I disagree. Therefore I am writing this post to start a debate on whether it is pointless to exchange ideas and thoughts with others.

I have asked him to provide provide original structured lemma for the post so that his contention will not be misconstrued by my subjective interpretation in the monologue. With his consent, I hereby first introduced his views on why it’s pointless to talk to others about your own ideas:

The End Point

To put it short, any good argument assumes good logic. So if both sides use good logic, in the end it’s a debate only about data. The problem with data is: as a last resort you can always deny it. Because logic relies on axioms. But axioms can never be proved. So you can always deny the reality of data put forward. Say blacks on average are stupid than Caucasians:

“No they are not!”

“Yes: data…”

“The data is manipulated by racists.”

“No it is not!”

“Yes it is!”

… The endpoint reached.

Of course moral principles aren’t provable either.

Let’s say “Tibet should be free”

“No it shouldn’t”

… The endpoint reached.

Meanwhile, spreading thoughts is good when you are dealing with influenceable people. But those tend to be pretty stupid and I hate dealing with them. I like to deal with smart committed people like myself. But with those have strong beliefs we will get to the endpoint sooner or later. Then again I believe my data is not very good still. So I’d rather keep on learning new data and new theories than going on preaching. If I really want to convince smart people I must continue to raise my level. You, on the other hand, have no pretenses of being a philosopher and are a social person used to deal with normal people. So people may listen to your arguments about the peril of lesser breeds. In Robin Hanson’s blog, as smug as it is, has good point saying that: people don’t take sides because of soundness of arguments; people take sides because of status signaling. So Kennedy, youthful good looking alpha dude, was popular because people wanted to associate with him, albeit his crappy arguments. In contrast, Nixon was way smarter but he was ugly and arrogant. So people didn’t want to be associated with him. I am not the most popular fella so I’d rather stick to my books. I did try to talk to those people. They didn’t like me. I returned the favor. Simple chicken and egg problem. Once again you listen to good arguments because you aren’t particularly biased. Most people just follow the mood. Whatever is popular whatever people will follow.

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I have been pretty busy working on something that doesn’t really require much of intelligence in Germany these days. The work has pretty much taken over all my time, leaving no time to read and write. Speaking of my way of writing, I am not sure how many of the readers are willing to suffer to finish all those tediously verbose articles I wrote (I did try my best to construct my writings as concise as possible after all). But I do feel excited once someone has the curiosity and the virtue (patience of virtue) to read over my heretic bs and feel like tossing a piece of his/her mind on my face and declare my theses completely bogus.

I am not masochist, and certainly I get very annoyed at people’s hysterical emotional outcry and slogan yelling (examples here and here), but I am always curious to know how people think and respond to new or different ideas. The other day I was walking home from work with a friend mine, I started to intentionally steer the casual discussion into a serious polemic on the pursuit of individual happiness. With my great rhetoric skills (I started training myself in the debate team and public speaking clubs ever since those wild days a.k.a. college period), I managed to lead the conversation to the direction that 1. the western society is almost as fragile as an old hollow tree on the verge of being nibbled out by massive parasitic bugs, and therefore 2. to pursue one’s happiness to the fullest, one should be as selfish as possible to strive for highest level of satisfaction over his/her 50 years of consciousness (provided that he/she lived 70 years perfectly health and sound).

Of course such arguments are far away from being an impeccable contention if the debate were held in the written form. But it was solid enough to overwhelm in that verbal discussion. That friend of mine, a well-informed and concerned westerner who does have a sense of respect for logic and reasoning, was pushed to reiterate his arguments for his idealistic middle class country life mode over and over again and finally did admit the logic of my politically incorrect arguments, though reluctantly.

“What’s the point? How do you explain the happiness from helping others for nothing?” He dropped the defense for his contention and started to seek any cracks from my arguments for an unexpected ambush.

“Point? Everything has a point.” I stammered for a while trying to organize my reasoning defense.

“The world is not only about ‘point’, we are imperfect mortals with deficient emotions. Happiness is not about to reaching a point” He tried to probe further for retaliation. But it was a pretty lame operationalization and immediately inspired me how I should respond, “the point of a thing is that thing’s realistic logic explanation. Everything could be explained by logic. There’s no exception. Emotions are pre-programmed logic that we are not even conscious about most of the time. Say you have the emotional tendency of sympathizing other people, or animal etc. This stems from the fact that you value your own organic life, more precisely your DNA, or your own consciousness. In pre-historical times humans were not physically fit for survival on our own, we need to cooperate with others and sometimes this means to ‘selflessly’ help others to survive in a group. The DNA of your spices thus has a higher possibility to be passed down and also you will have a higher chance to survive with others’ help in return. The evolution in those uncivilized ages have pre-programmed this essential logic, the continuation of DNA, into the existence of human sympathy in our ‘imperfect mortal emotions’. So essentially you feel happy by helping others, like liberal leftists feel happy by helping the inferior breeds and granting them superior rights, is a direct extrapolation of satisfying a point. Figure out what your points are and only focus on satisfying them, then you will get happy. Likewise, exactly because it’s pointless to live happily ever after in the western cultural Marxism bubble, you ought to further review your pre-programmed logic to fit in the current environment for your best existence, that is, to optimize your well-beings for two things: your ‘delusive free will’ and ‘core value of organic life – preservation of your DNA’. You need to always use logic over emotional instinct on things that you don’t understand at first.”

What a bunch of confusing and abstract combination of words. I left two ways out for him at that moment: either he burst into a serious emotional condemnation or stay confused and muted to digest the reasoning logic. Fortunately he chose the latter one (part of the reason why I consider him as a good friend, for he is reasonable and could be convinced by rationality). But the odd thing is that when I almost convinced him “wrong is wrong for there’s nothing wrong” such paradoxical theory, I started to instantaneously doubt about the validity of the contention I just made up. So, is there a logic explanation behind every observation?

So there is at least one logic explanation for everything that was happening and not happening? Does that imply that everything in this world could be explained by rationality and reasoning? What about those seemingly irrational decisions made by “imperfect” people? Well, now that even emotion could be rationally explained as the process of pre-programmed rational choice, it should be possible to look for a logic explanation for lots of un-logic things that simply don’t make sense. Is that contradictory? Let’s see. I have always thought that leftism is largely established on the denial of objective facts and logic speculation. To deny the natural differences among different groups of people certainly does not follow the logic of objective facts and of course this would bring a lot of avoidable serious social problems for the western society. But ss there a rational logic behind the leftists’ explicit irrational preference and blunt denial of objectivity? One could argue that those who were significantly pushing this ideology into the mainstream modern society must be extremely intelligent and know exactly what they were doing (unlikely most of their blindly following pupils). Why did they fail to detect the evident contradictions in their beliefs and objective facts? For the time being I would emphasize on the role of emotion in clouding their judgments. Perhaps exactly because they felt too proud to get down to the ground for practical ideologies all the time. Instead, they feel naturally superior to the rest, especially to the inferior types all over the world (e.g. Africans, aborigines, Muslims etc.). One of the most predictable consequence of such admittance of superiority over those people is to naturally pity them. As I mentioned above the feeling of sympathy does make sense somehow, 10,000 years ago probably. And it has been unconditionally amplified or shall I say abused with the luxury to afford doing so in the modern civilization. It is not easy to think deep enough to look for a logic speculation on pre-defined irrational items such as emotions (I wouldn’t even remotely touch such speculations if not stimulated by that spontaneous debate). Hence it is indeed logic to conjecture that leftist ideologists concluded that human kindness is pure and divine (without probing further why emotion) and therefore the ultimate justification for every action that goes against cold-blooded objective facts (leftism). It’s a much upgraded version of “helping others to feel better for yourself”. So we shall say the key to those smart leftists’ stubbornness (stupid ones are not worth discussing here) in denying objective facts and logic is their failing to see the rationality behind human emotions and taking sympathy as a universal virtue for granted. In this way it explains the reason why they would create a whole new thesis that is heavily built on sentimental values, which could be easily absorbed and recognized as resonating ethics with quasi-religious worship by the majority people who live in luxurious society of excessive productivity (most people don’t even bother thinking this far, so they would just take whichever makes best sense with their pre-programmed logic). Then the next thing you know there are people shouting these slogans as the undisputable divinity to infidels…

Does that logically interpret why the mainstream modern civilization adapts such blatant fallacy as THE brainwashing belief in the education and mass media nowadays? If so, then there’s still a hope to revert such actions: one could certainly hope that when the ugly bitterness finally comes back to those affluent beings from their denial and devastation to the foundation of modern civilization, more people would be able to see the realistic calculation out of their emotional cloud and act accordingly…

Anyhow, once again I have written so much already for one article. I’d like to stop the explorative discussion right here. Just one last question, how do I even know my logic is closer to the reality than others? Everyone has his/her own cognitive bias. What logic makes the most sense? One could argue from the theory of Occam’s razor. It is always more feasible to explain logic from the viewpoint of pragmatism than the pursuit of the “truth”. I tend to add two more criteria in judging the precision of one’s logic: your logic is most likely to be more practical to the real situation if 1. you are more well-informed than others (both the range of information and the depth of information), and 2. you are more open-minded to use reasoning to subjects you are not familiar with (favor objective facts over subjective emotional response).

I think I am going a bit too far with all the emotional outbreak these days with the minorities in China, especially the Uighur. Today while browsing Ortu Kan’s blog all of sudden I was struck by a piece of very old memory of mine that has been kept in the bottom of my heart for years.

Story goes back to my high school years in China. I remember it was an ordinary day in an ordinary city. I was going back home from school with a few friends of mine. On a crowded intersection, I saw a little kid, roughly 4~5 years old by appearance, on the street wandering behind a woman, flustered and scared, in attempt to steal the purpose from the woman’s bag from behind. He followed closely to the woman, then stiffly paused, flustered, scared, then followed up back again…Again and again, he was wandering like that on that intersection for at least 20 minutes, just couldn’t make the move to reach his little hands to… He seemed to literally have no clue how to steal and apparently don’t want to do it. But he was too scared to walk away. The little boy couldn’t help constantly glaring back to an adult who was hiding at the corner. It seemed he knew he had to do it for that man. There was a sense of immense trill and fear that continuously prompted him to stretch his hand into the bag… We couldn’t stop watching him and were overwhelmingly shocked by the disturbing scene we just witnessed. I could never forget his eyes, that pair of little innocent eyes full of fear, despair and pity. He was frequently rubbing his little hands when he glared back to offset his nervous and frightening emotion towards the the man in the corner, who was viciously staring back with pure maliciousness and apathy. To this day the boy’s image is still so clear and profound. It’s rather painful every time I thought of it; the image is still goddamn crystal-clear just like it happened yesterday… Anyhow, I called the police immediately but police said they couldn’t do nothing about it since they are minors who are actual stealing. they would send them back home but smugglers could bring them back anyway. I, with a few friends of mine, were about to stop that little kid from doing what he wasn’t supposed to do and then the adult dashed up from nowhere and showed us the big machete he had in his jacket… Many years later I am still wondering what happened to that little boy later that day…

That was the only personal experience with the Uighur of mine. My anger over Urumqi riot in 2009 and Hotan in 2011 have clouded my mind with prejudice and to some extent, resentment, against the Uighur recently. But the truth is I am in no position to carelessly generalize those peaceful ones who are living their day-by-day life and those radical extreme Islam fundamentalists. As a Chinese in the foreign land, I should have known better about the stupidity and irresponsibility of simple generalization and accusation based on the rash generalization. After all, it was my strong prejudice emotion that blocked my rational judgement. I feel rather bad and could only resolve consolation through writing this article to pacify some kind of peace in my heart.

Either way, I would be as objective, rational, and logic as possible from now on. There are already so many prejudice around the world, no need for one more from me. From now on, I will double, triple and even four times check the objectivity and rationality of my future articles, so as it could reflect the truth as close as possible.

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A few days ago I was engaged into an online extemporaneous polemic with a highly respectable Chinese professor in Hong Kong that has tremendous accomplishments in the field of life science. Aside from his great achievement in science, this professor also exerts great interest in politics and has always been a firm advocate for democracy in Hong Kong. Like most of strong liberals in Hong Kong, their view of democracy has specifically meanings, that is to vote and to be voted, more precisely, the universal suffrage for the election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. They have always been the forefront in waging populist protests and decrying most of policies and measures from the Hong Kong SAR government, a puppet of totalitarian Beijing authority and local capitalist moguls as they perceive. It is unsurprising that a strong liberal like this professor would also be very critical and even bigoted towards the mainland Chinese society and government in particular. Long story short, the debate started when he was accusing China with an unverified seemingly highly unreliable viral message regarding the current bullet train collision in China on the internet. In the beginning we were only focusing on the authenticity of the information and the responsibility and credibility of information propagation. It all of sudden escalated into a very intensive argument on the subject of democracy itself and of course, China. In order to stay strictly objective and fair in this article, and most important to make my article as authentic and genuine as possible,I will not give any further arguments in this article to analyze who’s right or wrong or who’s making more sense than the other. Instead, I am simply posting the original dialogue between me and him. I believe you as objective observers definitely have enough commonsense to make the judgement yourselves, and could reflect on why I chose this title for this article.

ME: it’s better to go through triangulation to confirm the authenticity of such viral message

Prof:. t.s.e (my real name, replaced as t.s.e. here), in mainland, there is no TRUTH under the one party leadership…rather believe no riot because the govt can crack it down immediately !!False is real and real is false in mainland and so i dont want to debate with you..it really does not matter. …if you don’t think there is a riot that’s fine, do you think by my spreading of such message a riot would happen?/ Who cares? In mainland, a human live is like an ant !!

ME: I absolutely understand your infuriation over the train crash and the reactions of the government. The same here. Freedom of press is always a mirage in China, that’s why I never read from Mainland news sites. I always try to rationalize my opinions based on confirmed facts and logic speculations. That’s why I disapprove such sketchy hearsay around the internet. One thing we could see is that the government is improving its publicity skills and reactions to such impromptu societal events, but that’s nowhere near acceptable level still. Riot or not, one could only speculate at this point, I’d rather wait for more solid proof to exert my opinions on it later. Right now what I care the most is how to prevent such incidents from happening again in China rather than how government repress people of free will. I don’t think there’s a strong ideology that drives the gov’t to ferociously confine its people other than retaining in power. However, it is the means this gov’t adopts to retain its authority is out-of-fashion and clumsy. In mainland, as mentioned in the article I provided above, the society is highly impetuous, wherein money is placed the highest value over all other matters. I deem that as the ultimate cause for such horrible tragedies in China. For the very same reason, people in China are way more pragmatic than others, therefore giving a possible space for such lousy governance. Hong Kong should not be unfamiliar with that. Functional democracy (ones in the West) is based on the existence of a well educated and enlightened majority, not by a democratic political system itself. I don’t think China is anywhere remotely near democracy.

Prof: T.S.E, this is totally wrong to think that only educated people can have democracy !! In 1930’s, communist party in CHina had full democracy…Democracy is a human right !!

ME: by educated people I am referring to a well-enlightened majority that could support a well-functioning democracy. Flaws emerge when democracy implies on people who have little sense of its basic doctrines. The situation in India is the best example. in 1930 communist party appears to have democracy on a small group of communists and its supporters, and CCP was NOT in power that time. To them democracy would be a new fancy tool to attract intellectuals frustrated by KMT’s totalitarianism and peasants in poverty. Freedom is a human right, democracy needs societal and mental pre-conditions to enforce and reinforce. Projecting a political system that’s highly developed based on a much higher level society will not bring prosperity for a society that is nowhere near ready for it. The only way to ensure a functional democracy system is through education and natural accumulation of economic and technological capital itself.

Prof: is this a good excuse to ignore basic human needs and become dictatorship?? No way. Your mind set is basically a dictator’s mind set. Hopeless.

ME: This is not excuse, it’s a piece of inconvenient fact. One brutal example: elections have been tried in selected villages in more developed region in China. It was deemed an experiment by the gov’t, but brutally failed when vote buying stepped in and screwed up everything, exactly what happened to democracy in Thailand. Truth is, a suitable political system is determined objectively the socio-economic development of the society itself. There is no good or bad in political system, only the fit or unfit ones. This is exactly the argument when modern democracy was first created in Europe. Read the The Social Contract by Rousseau. I am simply reflecting the reasonable facts. Free election will only become a basic human needs when people truly realize the value of democracy. My mindset is based on logic reasoning, and I am not bashing democracy, I do think it’s a much more sophisticated and effective political system, but it has its preconditions and limitations that determine it is not desirable at least in nowadays China

Prof: I have heard many easy reasons not to have democracy in china, none of them is a good reasons except to let communist party rule and keep the hard liner’ ruling such that their power and benefits or advantages over regular citizens forever!

ME: I’d like to see the downfall of communists in China as well. Regular citizens seem to woo that idea for sure. But then I will never be back to China again, coz I could feel what regular citizens feel and once seemingly defend for the CCP one time by accident on facebook. Oh wait, I wasn’t planning to go back anyway, CCP would still bust my ass for I have criticized them over many times. Democracy? Nah, I want my freedom but politicians are all hideous clowns. I’d go to Singapore probably…

Prof: In your blood, you liked to be controlled and so I am speechless

ME: Let’s blame it on the blood. I am indeed very submissive, I could never challenge the international standards and universal principles, I’d rather be Kunlun Nu than a deriding heretic, If that’s the price of being a realist. I was engaging a pure political discussion with logic reasoning and rational analysis. Your sentimental trajectory really upsets me. I do not deserve such outcry. I was simply questioning the essential logic of your contention “democracy is the basic human needs”. I would rather be willing be convinced with rational reasoning with objective facts than emotional response of right or wrong. I am just a person who likes to question a bit more than many others. I don’t think I am hopeless.

Prof: Your concept is totally wrong, democracy is a human right by international standard! Like it or not, it is a basic right to vote and to be voted.

ME: That doesn’t sound a logic explanation to me. Democracy is definitely not an international standard. As far I concern it’s a political system that works on some places and doesn’t seem to work much on other places. Why is democracy a basic human right then? To the same argument I should tell you “like it or not China is never going to get democracy, ‘international standard’ never applies on China..”, but it doesn’t sound convincing, does it? Either way, I will drop the discussion for the time being, as apparently you are unable to rationalize behind “Democracy as universal standard and human rights” at the moment. If you found my comments too shallow and ignorant, enlighten me, or maybe you could provide me with some good articles that I could get convinced by that idea.

Prof: simple, in your mind, you are superior than others and so some people’s rights could be ignored. your mind set is like a dictator’ s mind set and perhaps over the years you grew up in mainland you have already got those idea that democracy is not good for china, looking over all other countries, even they have democracy they can do manage themselve, democracy may not be the best political system but at leadt it is a fair system and i have to keep sying that democracy is basic human right.

ME: First of all, I was never putting myself in the realm of democracy discussion. I am purely regarding it as a political concept and philosophical treatise for logic argumentation. There’s no black and white here. I could give you tons of examples that democracy might have negative impacts on people that are imposed upon instead of embracing themselves. I am a realist that listen to rational reasoning and logic analysis. I left China when I was 17 and frankly I developed most of my cognitive system based on years of exploring different countries one after another and tons of intellectual reading. I care way more about the humanity than myself. However, the same argument I could impose on you: how do you know China is suitable for democracy when you never have the experience of everyday life there? As far as I concern, vote or to be voted are not the basic needs for the people in China at the moment. Political chaos is what it could bring and anyone with common sense would foresee that happening. And there would be absolutely no benefits to the normal people at all. Personal freedom is what normal Chinese deserves at the moment. People are not born equal, and exactly because of that, the best political system must be customized according to the variety of different society. The only difference is that you religiously believe in democracy as a divine doctrine whereas I see it as a mortal conception. If you really think people’s rights are the most important things in a society, you’d be more socialist than a democrat. Of course my arguments would not be strong enough shake your faith, as I mentioned before, everyone has certain level of cognitive bias. But I see rational reasoning as a possible bridge to at least ignite some intellectual discussion here. That would be the attitude for such debate rather than projecting philosophical contentions as if it were physical theorem. Having said, I still have high level of respect for you, since you are even willing to exchange ideas to me in the first place. However, I have to say, personal attack and emotional outcry are for politics, not political discussion between two intellectual individuals.

Prof: I do not have any emotional outcry , still an intellectual debate and i believe that all humans are created equal and thus democracy is a basic human right. In China, there is no personal freedom at al, no justice, people are not born equal but it does not mean than we cannot be treated equal. Mainland chinese officials are doing everything against the ideology as a socialist and they are just dictators, that is my conclusion. And they are using all the excuses like you have to say that democracy does not fit Chinese.

ME: You are being unreasonable here. “All humans are created equal and thus democracy is a basic human right” is a not a mere assertion that is not even a logic cause-effect. You still try to label me as mainland Chinese over anything else, and therefore uncompromisingly link my realistic and logic point of view to the Chinese government’s propaganda. I take as you have never personally challenged the concept of democracy in the first place and questioned the rationale behind the statement such as “democracy is basic human need and people are created equally”. My hope is that you could read more about the concept of democracy and develop an absolute logic explanation to justify your position. We need to be convinced with reasoning based on facts and logic, not emotional attachment. This is NOT a “now-or-never” “good-or-wrong” moral discussion. It would be pointless to argue if one denies the logic despite it reaches the commonsense ground. You assertion is fine. But it needs a lot more theoretical support which you couldn’t provide with. This is no different than the church claimed geocentrism is the truth and that’s final in the medieval age, then using this mere assertion as a divine dogma to accuse anyone else who tried to challenge the contention. As a result, it would be pointless for me to argue the conceptual standing ground of democracy with you. Then let’s switch the topic down from abstract logic to a specific case China. As I mentioned before, Chinese government was merely making efforts to retain its power and authority, as far as they see having democracy in China would impose great risk to their power. Hence they tend to also create “unquestionable” assertions such as China is China and democracy deems not fit for China is unique. It is true they often cite the instability and chaos democracy associates in non-Western countries to scare Chinese away from the idea, the same logic to use ethic argument to deter people from challenge a philosophical thesis. I do not like their obscurantism, either. In a fair conclusion, I think you need to be better informed about China to see it is really as you claim there’s no personal freedom, no justice and people live like ants in China. Those are very absolute and specific claims that are usually based on either an extremely well-informed observer (rare cases a political system could still survive after so much wrongdoing) or a ill-informed opinionated outsider who could choose only to look at one facade with their own prism. Though I have way more legitimacy to talk about those specific issues you mentioned for I have a more thorough sense of mainland Chinese society than you do, I won’t use that as an argument to convince you anything. I honestly hope you are more open-minded to know more about China other than those subjective news reporting. I got the feeling that it is rather you that are speaking from a superior position to me. I would advise you to stay for a period of time in Mainland to talk to the normal people, the group of people you are defending for in this conversation, and then let’s talk if government is evil and people live in no freedom and justice like ants. That does sound fair to you, doesn’t it?

Prof: Fact and logic is that all humans are created equal and thus to vote and to be voted are basic human right, very simple and fair. I know China very well since i was a kid from cultural revolution until today !! I never speak from any superior position, just that you have such “Class Struggle” concept in your mind and I went to mainland very often until I am not allowed to enter anymore. Because of many people with your idea and concept of democracy in China and thus the dictators can rule CHina forever, or perhaps you were brain wahed since you were young and hence I am not surprised to see you wrote such a long paragraphy to debate with me. Poor you.

ME: Your pre-assumptions and accusations don’t really make yourself a better argument here. “Fact and logic is that all humans are created equal and thus to vote and to be voted are basic human right” is a simple statement that needs logic justification and operationalization. People have spent generations and generations in Europe to devise the idea. How can you say “humans are born equal and that’s logic” without further reasonable explanations? That sounds no difference than “Allah is the only god so shut up!” I don’t know what a “class struggle” is, and I probably was brainwashed, that’s why I could organize my arguments structurally and logically. Your cognitive bias will simply satisfy what you want to believe, you are constantly dodging from my logic arguments all the time and emphasizing on a fraction part of my life experience and assume my way of thinking is solely built on the empirical cognition I received at that stage and attack your imaginary stereotype in your imagination which is itself incoherent and simply don’t make any sense. How can you attack my well-structure rational argumentation with “brain-washing by the communists when I was young”? With all due respect, I was very well polite to you all through the debate. But at this point, it looks like you are just hysterically insulting my rationality and intelligence. Unlike you, I will not toss the emotional derisive personal attack back to you. Instead, I have saved all our conversation and post it on my blog. theslittyeye.wordpress.com Let’s let others to judge who is making sense here, or maybe in the future when you calm down from your emotional blockage, your rationality could be enlightened by reading our conversation again.

Prof: Sorry, I do not have any emotional blockage. You just want to use your so called logical thinking to justify your right over others .Actually you should not have posted our personal discussion up on to your own blog. Anyway, it does not matter.Again, this posting of our discussion shows that you have no concept of what is basic human right.

Excuse us for our broken English and especially my verbose arguments. Aside from that, this pretty much tells you what the level of cognitive bias is like for a strong liberal in Hong Kong.